Getting into digital illustration - what you need?

[Baby Of The Year]

My partner is a keen poet and sometimes she has her work illustrated and published or she's attempted to sell limited quantities as cards or post cards or one off prints. She always hand writes too but she is now eager to move into the digital domain so she can dabble with the illustrations herself. When I say illustrate, I mean adding simple doodles around the text, not full on Simon Stålenhag digital paintings. Can anyone here recommend the best tools for the job? She's thinking an ipad pro and apple pencil but instead of spunking away close to a grand we don't have on another of her flights of fancy does anyone have better alternatives?

CHEERS.

[Sebastian Cobb]

A Wacom tablet and a subscription for Adobe Illustrator would do the job better.

[surreal]

If budget is a concern you'd probably want to look at Affinity instead of Adobe, especially as they've started upping the prices of their subscriptions without notice and removing the rights to use older versions of their software.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/store/

£50 for the desktop versions or £20 for the ipad ones.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I found there was a bit of a learning curve with vector drawing. If she'd prefer more of a normal sketching experience, perhaps photoshop (or a free counterpart, like Gimp) and a cheap graphics tablet would do. In my experience, Wacom tablets aren't much better than the less expensive ones on the market.

Here's a doodle I made in Photoshop, using a tablet that I bought for fifty quid.

[Blue Jam]

Krita:

https://krita.org/